planet kurdistan at venice

sonradan eklenen onemli not: farkli seyler umut edip bloga duyuruyu koydum. ama gordugum umut ettigimi tutmadi. baska seyler yapilabilecek bir firsatmis, tepilmis.



Malva, Mire Hekan, Norrem Issan Hamdi, Bahar Maleki, Monireh Maleki, Hasan Huseyin Deveci (Malmime), Huseyin Isik, Ilter Rezan, Fehmi Balay, Rebwar Saeed, Azad Nanakeli, Baldin Ahmad, Walid Siti

PLANET Kurdistan is a laboratory of ideas and projects that has the aim to contribute to the discussion on the Kurdish cultural identity. It is a collective imagination process able to represent all of the complexities and diversities of this people and to encourage a shared future.
PLANET K is a virtual platform, through its web site www.planetk.org, and a physical place within the 53° International Art Exposition - Venice Biennale, staged in San Leonardo in Venice.With the contribution of the collective of architects, designers and graphics of Rebiennale, San Leonardo will be turned into a laboratory in which Kurdish artists - and thanks to an Open Call, all the people who would want to give their contribution - will meet, share opinions, and collectively build the necessary premises for the definition of a Kurdish cultural identity.
The Venice Art Biennale is one of the most prestigious international arenas for contemporary art, a place in which relations between art and national representation meet in a complex and articulated way. Every country chooses which artists can best interpret its artistic progress, its open-mindedness and its aspirations. In this context, representing the art of a stateless nation is the presupposition of a self-determination process. Art not seen as spectacle, but as an inspiration towards an identification process.
PLANET K aims to be above all a space for debate, comparison and production among the Kurdish artists, coming from all of the four countries in which the Kurdish people have been divided - Iran, Iraq, Syria and Turkey -, but also from the ‘fifth’ part, that is represented by the exiles. The Kurdish Diaspora is indeed a reality of well over one million and three hundred thousand people only in Western Europe.
In the two weeks before the opening of the Biennale, artists, philosophers, designers, sociologists, journalists etc. interested in the definition of this collective imagination process will debate about three fundamental issues, synthesis of the future potentials of the Kurdish people: Identity, Borders, Language.
Identity
The effort of the Kurdish intellectuals goes in the direction of an identity which reflects the experience of war, exile, forced migration, but which is also able to see beyond. An effort which starts from the denied identity (in particular in Turkey were the state represses systematically the Kurdish identity) and from the intimate identity lived by thousands of exiled Kurds, towards the claim of a lively identity. Identity as memory, dialogue, exchange.
Borders
Kurdistan is a region divided by borders rather than enclosed by them. A region separated in four different national realities whose borders are crossed every day by thousands of people escaping war, persecution and poverty. Borders are barriers, linguistic, cultural but also individual barriers met in the ‘host’ countries, which are often inhospitable. Borders, as those that metaphorically are confining women into a position of second-class citizens.
Language
In the process of building Planet K we were actually communicating in seven languages: Sorani, Kurmanci, Turkish, Italian, English, French and German. Language is a form of resistance, especially in states like Turkey, where it is still a forbidden and persecuted language. Language is the vehicle of a new message for the future, it means being able to express its own ideas freely. It’s fundamental to manage to communicate your own past in order to being able to built a solid bases for your future, while making of diversities a richness rather than an unease legacy.
The 53° International Art Exposition with its title Fare Mondi/Making Worlds inspires this process of belonging. Not the belonging to an official culture, a state culture, but an inclusive belonging, in constant definition, open to influences and possibilities for future development. PLANET K is much more than a national art exhibit, it is a shared space where our imagination, our aspirations and our ideas can live. It is a new planet.
KURDISTAN
Kurdistan never existed as a national political entity, despite the fact that the Sevres Treaty (1920) was taking into consideration the possibility of an independent Kurdistan, in the case that the majority of the people living in that territory requested it. The Treaty of Lausanne (1923) cancelled this hope and established the division of Kurdistan (region rich of oil, water and other natural resources) among the states of Turkey, Iraq, Iran and Syria. Over the years the Kurdish claim to a nation-state have been replaced by a search, often experimental, of new forms of autonomy. Over the last weeks the talks over a possible first peace conference to be held in the autonomous region of Iraqi Kurdistan are becoming more recurring. The aim would be to have around a table all of the parties involved in the conflict, which has its most violent expression in Turkey.